Use of free on-line machine translation for interactive Cross-Language Question Answering

Abstract

Free on-line machine translation systems are employed more and more by Internet users. In this paper we have explored the use of these systems for Cross-Language Question Answering, in two aspects: in the formulation of queries and in the presentation of information. Two topic-document language pairs were used, Spanish-English and Spanish-French. For each of these, two groups of users were created, depending on the level of reading skills in document language. When machine translation of the queries was used directly in the search, the number of correct answers was quite high. Users only corrected 8% of the translations proposed. As regards the possibility of using machine translation to translate into Spanish the text passages shown to the user, we expected the search of the users with little knowledge of the target language to improve notably, but we found that this possibility was of little help in finding the correct answers for the questions posed in the experiment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.